Germany’s chancellor has lamented what she says was irrefutable proof of a Russian “hacking attack” on her Bundestag office, adding that she is working day and night to fix relationships with Moscow despite the “painful” incident.
Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the hacking allegations while speaking to MPs on Wednesday. “I can honestly say that it hurts me,” she said of the perceived Russian involvement in a computer network attack on her Bundestag constituency office back in 2015.
“I’m striving towards better relationships with Russia every day,” Merkel said, arguing that there is “hard evidence” that some unspecified “Russian forces” were behind the hack. “I take these things very seriously because I believe that research has been done very properly,” she added.
That doesn’t make mending ties with Moscow any easier, she said, before lamenting the well-worn “hybrid warfare strategy of Russia.”
Russia denied the allegations when they first emerged back in 2015, and has continued to do so in the years since. However, it is yet to comment on Merkel’s fresh remarks.
When asked about the possible consequences of Moscow’s alleged actions, she warned that “[Germany], of course, will always reserve the right to take measures, including against Russia.”
The chancellor’s words came on the heels of a report by Spiegel magazine linking the 2015 online assault to Russian military intelligence. Culprits, it suggested, were able to get away with over 16 gigabytes of data, which include thousands of inbox messages originating from the chancellor’s Bundestag office.
According to Spiegel, the hackers apparently copied the emails to another computer. It was only in May 2015 that the Bundestag discovered its networks were breached; it was concluded that the hack attacks had been happening since at least the beginning of that year.
While the magazine heavily cited the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) among their sources, the agencies in question kept silent on the matter. The German government, in turn, didn’t confirm the authenticity of the report, until Merkel herself addressed it in her speech Wednesday.
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